November 27 - December 4

“It’s hard to think of something, anything, that Martel doesn’t do well.” – Kent Jones, Film Comment

 Martel is “the leading director of the Argentine renaissance.” – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Lucrecia Martel’s Salta Trilogy, named after the northwestern province of Argentina where the director grew up and in which her films are set, surely must count as one of the signal achievements of the past decade. As with countryman Lisandro Alonso, whose feature debut, La Libertad, announced his methods and themes in concentrated form, Martel established her singular style and vision, her terrain of oblique unease among Argentina’s rural bourgeoisie, with her remarkable debut feature, La Ciénaga. The film’s Gothically disturbed household, reminiscent of Buñuel’s isolated clans or compatriot Torre Nilsson’s provincial patricians in Hand in the Trap, is presided over by bitter, imperious Mecha, part Miss Havisham, part Norma Desmond, as she drunkenly cries out for ice and red wine, denounces the Indian maids, and threatens to take to her bed, as her mother did for the last decades of her life. The first of Martel’s three wounded matriarchs, Mecha, like the holy girl’s mother and the headless woman, slips into a reverie of escape, an oft-promised shopping trip to Bolivia which, like all else in her unmoored life, comes to naught. The sense of decay and inebriation in La Ciénaga, set in a crumbling mansion aptly named after a narcotic and surrounded by invading jungle, would become in The Holy Girl an aura of torpor and stanched desire in a fading hotel, in The Headless Woman a world of shuttered twilight and incipient madness. “Why does everyone in our family go crazy?” someone wonders in that film. “All of the ones who’ve died have been insane.”

One might borrow Ken Loach’s title, Family Life, for Martel’s oeuvre, so intent is the latter upon the examination of familial ties, ancestral tensions. (One of the challenges of her cinema, given the extraordinary physical intimacy of brothers and sisters, children and parents, masters and servants, is sorting out just who is who – cousin? sibling? maid? friend? lover?)  Like Malick and Apichatpong, Martel somehow manages to